WAR ON THE 21ST CENTURY BATTLEFIELD: REVISITING GENERAL STARRY’S CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
FRANK JONES MAY 16, 2024 8 MIN READ
Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.
Today, U.S. Army General Donn A. Starry, the commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) from July 1977 to July 1981, is best remembered as the architect of the Cold War doctrine known as AirLand Battle, that first appeared in the 1982 edition of Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations. AirLand Battle doctrine was an artifact of a dispirited army turning its attention away from recent failed counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam to focus instead on the Warsaw Pact and the defense of Western Europe. Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.
Starry developed AirLand Battle to replace the controversial doctrine of Active Defense that his predecessor and inaugural TRADOC commander, General William DePuy, had developed for the 1976 version of FM 100-5. Many U.S. Army officers and defense analysts rejected DePuy’s approach, deeming Active Defense as reactive, emphasizing defense and stopping the “Soviet operational breakthrough maneuver” rather than taking the offensive. But affecting change in an institution as large as the army is challenging. As retired brigadier general Huba Wass de Czege has pointed out, “the Army’s struggle to get the doctrine ‘right enough’ after Vietnam” took “13 years”, and when AirLand Battle was “right enough,” it was a “way of thinking about war and a mental conditioning rather than a rigid set of rules and list to be done in lock-step fashion.”
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/conceptual-framework/
